T. E. Lawrence

Contents lists

1888-1910

1911

1912

1913

1914

1915-16

1917-18

1919-20

1921

1922

1923

1924

1925

1926

1927

1928

1929

1930

1931

1932

1933

1934

1935

Updated June 2012

T. E. Lawrence to Henry Wiliamson

Extracts, 44 words omitted

---

[11 December 1928]

Thank you for Rutter's books on Mecca and Medina. They are most modestly good: very human, and fair, and fresh. The entire absence of great-mindedness is very charming. I wonder who he is? Some very queer fish, probably, who has lived for a long while on the wrong side of the world.

- - -

You say The Pathway is unhappy stuff. Well, so is all my writing. Let not us impotents be shy of our impotencies, behind the licked envelopes of letters.

- - -

You'll laugh to hear that I still pick up Tarka often, read a few pages, and lay it down. I find it holds more than I thought, even at first: and what I said the first time was 'pemmican': a variety, I’m told, of pressed beef.

- - -

The public pressure on you to write another book before you feel inclined to think of a pen seriously, must be horrid.
 

Note:
Extracts, printed in Genius of Friendship out of sequence, but in the correct sequence here. Full text, 192 words, in Letters Vol. 9 p. 57.

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T. E. Lawrence chronology

1888 16 August: born at Tremadoc, Wales

1896-1907: City of Oxford High School for Boys

1907-9: Jesus College, Oxford, B.A., 1st Class Hons, 1909

1910-14: Magdalen College, Oxford (Senior Demy), while working at the British Museum's excavations at Carchemish

1915-16: Military Intelligence Dept, Cairo

1916-18: Liaison Officer with the Arab Revolt

1919: Attended the Paris Peace Conference

1919-22: wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom

1921-2: Adviser on Arab Affairs to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office

1922 August: Enlisted in the Ranks of the RAF

1923 January: discharged from the RAF

1923 March: enlisted in the Tank Corps

1923: translated a French novel, The Forest Giant

1924-6: prepared the subscribers' abridgement of Seven Pillars of Wisdom

1927-8: stationed at Karachi, then Miranshah

1927 March: Revolt in the Desert, an abridgement of Seven Pillars, published

1928: completed The Mint, began translating Homer's Odyssey

1929-33: stationed at Plymouth

1931: started working on RAF boats

1932: his translation of the Odyssey published

1933-5: attached to MAEE, Felixstowe

1935 February: retired from the RAF

1935 19 May: died from injuries received in a motor-cycle crash on 13 May

1935 21 May: buried at Moreton, Dorset